Rhapsodizing the Fullness
[“For it was (the Father’s) good pleasure for all the divine fullness to dwell in (the Christ)” (Col 1:19).]
O Lover,
Across the sweep of two millennia one of the more neglected passages in Christian writ is the first chapter of Paul’s epistle to the Colossians. Having declared Your Anointed to be “the image [eíkon] of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation,” the apostle proceeds to unpack implications: “all things [ta pánta] have been created through and by him”; he is anterior to ta pánta, all of which cohere in him; the goal is that Your Christ—beginning, head, and firstborn of the dead—be “preeminent” in ta pánta (15-18). Verse 19 is a pithy summary: “For [You were] pleased to have all [pan] the divine fullness (pleróma [Gr]; plenitúdinem [Vulg]) to dwell in [the Christ].”
Amidst christologies dominated by atonement, propitiation, and sacrifice, I earlier was but minimally interested in the Colossians passage. This neglect began to be challenged in time as I came to experience You as quite different from the deities implicit in such theories. Across the decades a question was surfacing which would not be denied: for whom had I been longing since forever: the deity demanding appeasement or the one of inundating and unconditional love? During those same decades my previous highly individualistic view of the impact of Your Christ was being transformationally dilated toward the cosmic. It is thus not surprising that I have more recently been revisiting Colossians 1, beginning, in the words of T. S. Eliot, to “know the place for the first time” (Four Quartets).
In the wake of becoming conscious via Your Christ that You are nothing less than Love Itself (I Jn 4:8,16), O Lover, I declare that I experience him to be Your iconic Voilà! regarding Your relationship with all graced with being. Though it was never otherwise, he was/is Your historical and embodied concretion, Your “show and tell,” indeed the “showcase” (epiphaneia) of Your timeless intention to draw into Your Self all having been created in Your Self-outpouring (kenósis [Phil 2:7]). The Christ not only depicts, but IS, the relationship between You and all of us creatures; he IS the creation being deified, engodded. In him are wed time and eternity; form and formlessness, the finite and the Infinite, matter and spirit; in him are proleptically resolved all dualities of separation, alienation, hatred and fear. Such is my modest attempt to unpack the meaning for me of the Christ being the locus of all of Your “fullness” (19), a plentitude in which You find delight.
Finally, O Lover, while I have come to awareness of the multiplicity of ways in different eras, cultures, and traditions in which You are Self-disclosing, You who seemingly cannot do otherwise, that Voilà! for me but one of Your innumerable finite beloveds, has overwhelmingly been centered in Your Christ. His ”show[ing]” to us of You, O Lover, has been “enough for us” (Jn 14:8). And his stature across the span of my life has expanded exponentially to cosmic and universal proportions. He it is who is indeed “Lord” (Kúrios [Phil 2:11]), the concrete rendering in the human medium of Your fullness. In a word, Your Christ is enough.
